This evening we went to Bozar Theatre to see Matthew Lenton’s Interiors. Broadly inspired by a theatre piece by Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlink, Interiors is more particularly inspired by a story Lenton read about a Norwegian, living in a remote area, who insisted that an active social life was the only way to survive the long, dark winters. The audience gaze, Rear View Window-style, into the dining room of a house whose widower owner and sexually frustrated grand daughter are preparing for a traditional feast to celebrate the shortest day of the year (and hence theoretically the end of the worst of the winter). The guests arrive, all with guns to ward off possible polar bear attacks. We cannot hear their conversations, but we can see their interactions, at times comic, at times sad. A spirit, at first ethereal and then embodied in a young, anonymous, female ghost, tells the audience some of what is going on. We can guess the rest. The dynamics of sexual desire and jealousy, of the constant struggle for attention, of inward introspection, of the desire for intimacy and company are brilliantly and silently played out by the cast. There are cultural references, from Anton Chekhov (those guns!) to Hitchcock to John Irving (what the characters did next, as In the World According to Garp), but the piece works powerfully well at the simplest level; a realistic, poignant portrait of aching loneliness in a crowd.